Designing Glengarry Glen Ross
Acclaimed designer Eugene Lee brings 1980s Chicago to the stage
By Ian Chant |
The set for last season's The Seafarer, which Eugene Lee also designed. |
Eugene Lee is one of American theatre’s most storied scenic designers, described
by Seattle Rep Properties Coordinator Jolene Obertin as “a national treasure.” High
praise indeed, but if anyone has the resume to back it up, it’s Lee. He developed
the groundbreaking set for the original production of
Sweeney Todd, a design that
won him one of several Tony awards, designed Broadway’s
Wicked, and he has been
involved in the design of
Saturday Night Live since the show’s inception.
His relationship with Seattle Rep is nearly as long, stretching back to 1983 when
Lee designed the set for the first production in the Bagley Wright Theatre, The
Ballad of Soapy James. It’s an artistic partnership that now spans four decades,
continuing this year as Lee’s vision helps to shape the Rep’s production of Glengarry
Glen Ross. The show finds Lee once again working with director Wilson Milam, just
a year after the pair brought The Seafarer to life in the same space.
Milam’s organic directing style is well complemented by Lee’s take on design, says
Obertin, who has worked with Lee on several productions, creating and tracking down props
to populate the worlds he creates. She describes Lee as “...a very interesting kind of
designer. He’s great about letting a director play around with the actors in the space,”
Obertin says. “He doesn’t give a really tight ground plan and say ‘The desk has to be
here.’ He really lets the director explore that, which is great.”
This go-around, however, the one thing that will go unchanged is Mamet’s original
setting of Glengarry Glen Ross. Milam, Obertin notes, “has been really concerned with
what is available in the 1980s, because we’re keeping this show when it was written.”
Audiences can expect to see a version of Glengarry Glen Ross that exists in a very
specific time and place: the Chicago of the 1980s, where the play was first conceived.
For Obertin, this means getting all the details just right, from big, noticeable touches
like desks adorned with typewriters, rather than computers, right down to the finest print,
like the contents of bulletin board memos and forms found around the office.
“We’re trying to find something as close to 1980s boilerplate paperwork as we can,”
says Obertin.
But the set can’t just represent when the action of a play takes place—it also
needs to give us some insight into the characters that exist within it. The Glengarry
production team is attempting to give the set the feel of a less-than-reputable establishment,
placing the action in a Chicago warehouse that has been converted into offices. It’s the
sort of space that Obertin says would be a much-sought-after piece of real estate today, but
in the time of the play was a lower-priced space in a lousier neighborhood. The perfect
headquarters, in other words, for a real estate company that’s more fly-by-night than lifelong
relationship.
In anchoring Glengarry Glen Ross so firmly in a specific time, the production team
has to walk a fine line, making clear that the piece exists in a different era without giving
it the feel of a period piece. The challenge, as Obertin describes it, is finding “what’s going
to make it look like it’s not today, but also what’s not going to be so quaint that it will
become distracting.”
But this challenge also proves to be the most rewarding aspect of Obertin’s work. She sifts
through old catalogs, recreating the look and feel of a play whose overriding themes of unchecked
greed and malfeasance ring as true today as twenty five years past.
